


Book 2 - Rachel

by missyay



Series: Bargaining With the Universe [2]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Chloe Price Stayed at Blackwell, F/F, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Save Chloe Price Ending, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-02-05
Packaged: 2021-02-22 10:09:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22281211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missyay/pseuds/missyay
Summary: Two’s company. Three’s a crowd, her mom likes to say. Rachel has always been good with a crowd.
Relationships: Kate Marsh & Chloe Price, Rachel Amber/Chloe Price, Rachel Amber/Maxine "Max" Caulfield/Chloe Price
Series: Bargaining With the Universe [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1574962
Comments: 68
Kudos: 197





	1. All the Stars Are Still There

**Author's Note:**

> Book two of three, this time from Rachel's perspective! You definitely should have read book one, or this isn't going to make a lot of sense.
> 
> Thanks to [belikebumblebee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/belikebumblebee/pseuds/belikebumblebee) for the beta reading and the encouragement and the patient and also the witty little notes in the margins, and thanks also to everyone who left a comment so far, I loved each and every one of them <3
> 
> And this of course goes here as well: I am not trying to make more sense or be more accurate than the video game, so please be kind to me about any inconsistencies (especially about including "Before the Storm", I very much took my pick about what parts of canon I'll take and leave). What I am trying to achieve is to be kinder than the video game was, so absolutely do let me know if I forgot to tag or warn for anything. <3 Have fun!

Rachel leans out of the window and into the green world outside while Max begins, haltingly, to tell her story. It already feels familiar, but there’s still a shred of doubt in Rachel that says _that can’t be, it’s not possible._

Max explains how she fell out of touch with Chloe after she moved to Seattle, how she couldn't handle the grief that was palpable around her following her father's death. She explains how she got a scholarship for Blackwell, and how she went there because the famous photographer and heartthrob Mark Jefferson taught there. She draws a shuddering breath and delves into one day at Blackwell in particular, how she went to the bathroom to deal with the aftermath of a dream - a vision - a _something_ that had shown her Arcadia Bay in the middle of a storm.

"Nathan Prescott came in after me, and I hid behind the stalls. He had a gun. And then Chloe followed him - I didn't recognize her, because I hadn't seen her in ages, and this girl had _tattoo sleeves and bright_

_blue_

_hair, she's clipped it to chin length, and she's staring at her phone with a familiar intensity. You come closer to try and give her some - whatever it is she needs, and glimpse your own name on the phone screen: Chloe is trying to call you._

_"I'm here", you say, but the words don't form. Your breath doesn't manifest into sound. There is no breath, and when you try to put a hand on Chloe's shoulder, you don't have hands, either. All you are is a perspective on this strange blue-haired, tattooed Chloe, who is shaking her phone like that is going to get you to pick up._

_It's just a dream, you think, relieved. It's a dream._

_Except you can remember exactly what happened before this: Posing for Evan, the click of the shutter the last thing you heard before you ended up here in a whirl of colors. If it's a dream, it's a very long one, with a lot of detail._

_"Fuck", Chloe says viciously. She throws her phone onto her bed, where it bounces once and then lands on the floor with a_ clunk _. You go to pick it up before you remember that you don't have hands. You look at the cracked screen helplessly, and then get treated to a front row seat of Chloe throwing herself on her bed as well, her face in her hands. When she emerges, her face is dry. Her jaw is clenched in a way you haven't seen before._

_She looks tortured, you think._

_"Chloe", you try to say, but there's nothing._

_"Fucking everyone leaves me," Chloe says. It sounds almost resigned, like she's getting used to it._

_You lean in closer as if to lie next to Chloe, but without the familiar warmth of her body it's just disconcerting, and soon you give up and move in on Chloe's phone again. The screen is dark, but the front camera seems inviting - you tilt, and shift, and whirl into it, disappearing into an array of colors and pixels -_

"Fuck", she says. "I thought those were dreams."

"What were?" Max says, sitting up. She sounds entirely serious. Makes sense, Rachel thinks, that she'd assign more meaning to dreams, after what she's been through. Makes sense that her story would sound so familiar to Rachel. They both want the validation that what happened to them doesn't mean they're insane.

No wonder Rachel feels so drawn to her all of a sudden.

"This spring, I started having - I don't know - visions? Of this Chloe you were describing, she was looking for me, I saw her print missing person flyers and everything - I wanted to help her or tell her I was here, but I wasn't - you know when you have a dream and you know you're you but not really? It was like that."

Max is off the tree and next to Rachel in a heartbeat. "You can go there? You've been there recently? How is my Chloe doing?"

_My Chloe_. Rachel chances a brief look at Chloe, who is crossing her arms and leaning back against the tree trunk like she doesn’t care about any of it. "It's, um - It seemed to happen when people took pictures of me? Like I traveled into the camera and - uh - out somewhere else. It wasn't all the blue haired Chloe, I would also visit one where she was in a wheelchair, briefly..."

"When I took your picture by the car, where did you go?" Max asks, urgent. 

Rachel turns to her and sees her face drawn with guilt. 

“I didn’t go anywhere.” When she says it, she doesn’t know if it will be a relief or a punch to the gut. From her expression, neither does Max. “It was the first time since it started that I didn’t go anywhere when someone took my picture. It’s why I was so quiet after.”

Max’s face slackens, but Rachel still can’t tell if it’s the relief or something else. Acceptance, maybe.

She decides to let her think, leans over and into Chloe, reaching up to ruffle her hair. Chloe squirms out of the way, but with an indulgent smile. “You guys seem to know more than me, now, which, wow, didn’t see that coming - but, uh, care to catch _me_ up now?”

Rachel rummages in her bag.

"I kept a - well, a dream journal, I called it. Maybe it helps? Max can fill in the gaps."

"I mean... if you want me to. It's not really a nice part of your life." Max looks over to Chloe doubtfully.

"It's not really _my_ life, so what would I care?" Chloe says, but Rachel knows her well enough to call that bluff. Chloe is not one to be stingy with her feelings.

"Caring is all you do," she says gently, but still pulls her dream journal from her bag and opens it to the first entry.

"Just catch me up on my parallel life, you hag," Chloe says, smiling just a little.

Rachel leans back out the window for light, and does. When she reaches the time Max shows up, Max takes over again - less halting this time, and more haunting. Rachel tucks away the second half of her diary without reading it to them, relieved.

*

"Fuck," Chloe says, emphatic. "I mean, I feel like I shouldn't be pitying myself but my alternate life has been _shit_ , you guys."

Max nods. Unlike Chloe, she doesn't make an effort to obscure the pity she feels. And there's that familiar something else, accompanying it, etched into her expression like it means to stay: grief.

“Do you miss her?” Rachel asks, and Max covers her face with her hands and nods.

When she talks, her voice is shaking. “I know it’s stupid, and it’s hypocritical, and it’s pointless, but it feels like - I killed her. I left that reality, and now it’s gone, and good riddance too, but I felt like she was- I was ready to spend the rest of my life with her. She said she would never leave me. And then the first thing I did was leave her.”

“Hey.” Chloe sidles up to Max, puts a hand on her arm. “I feel like I have some authority on the issue, and personally I’d like to thank you for making sure none of that bullshit ever happened to me.”

“Or me,” Rachel adds. “But you get to grieve. It’s still someone you will probably not see again, in that exact constellation. But all the stars are still there, and I think that makes it a little better.”

“So much better,” Max promises through tears. She reaches out with both arms and pulls Chloe and Rachel in for a hug. Rachel raises her right arm to close the circle. 

After a moment, she extricates herself carefully, and walks out of the shed into the green world they had only discovered half an hour ago. She doesn’t wait for the other two to follow her; if they need to talk something out, they will. She knows of the necessity to have one on one conversations, even if she is now officially part of the Situation.

She finds a moss-covered hill that the October sun paints a shadow and light paisley on, and lies down on it. It’s soft and springy under her back, and if she arranges her limbs in a pose that’ll make for a nice picture, then well, she’s the only one who needs to know. She peers up into the sky, where feathery swirls are dotting the pale blue. No storm to be seen.

She wonders, briefly, if they’re all collectively losing their minds, then abandons the thought in favor of admiring the tiny, thin-stemmed white flowers that are growing out of the moss around her. If they are, she thinks, at least she’s not alone. At least she’s lying on a soft surface, and the sun is shining down on her, and she can feel the thrill of possibility tingle in her fingertips. 

If this is insanity, it’s a kind one. Rachel decides to cherish that. 

She hears someone approach and then hover, and calls out, “Hey, Max, take my picture!” 

She plucks one of the white flowers and tucks it behind her ear. 

“Are you sure?” Max’s voice rings out to her. 

“I am!” she calls back, arranging herself in a more obvious pose as if to emphasize. 

There’s a faint _click_ , and then an absence of a colorful vortex that she had almost gotten used to. She smiles. 

“Nothing,” she says. “You did it.”

“Yes,” Max says, smiling faintly. “I did _not_ leave my Chloe in a world where everyone who loves her is dead. I deleted her from existence, instead. Well done, me.”

It sounds only half as sarcastic as it should, and it’s clear that Max thinks this option the better one. But that doesn’t mean she’ll be celebrating it anytime soon. 

She’s caught the polaroid between middle and index finger and is waving it in the air absently. Her other hand is still clutching the lily. She doesn’t look like she’s going to let go of it any time soon.

“Did you know that you don’t need to do that?” Rachel says.

“What?”

“Shake the polaroid. It doesn’t do anything to make the picture appear any faster.”

Max looks down at it and shrugs. “And yet here you are, in full color.” 

She hands the picture to Rachel.

Rachel has never seen her give a picture she took to anyone. She always pockets them all, hoards them jealously, and eventually puts them up on her walls. Rachel doesn’t know what this means.

She takes it.

It’s a good one, too, one she could put in her portfolio or hand out when people ask for something that’s not a headshot. She moves to put it in her back pocket, and her fingers close around the edge of another glossy piece of paper.

Rachel takes it out, and looks at the two of them next to each other: Chloe and her, hugging under a tree grown cross, among a sea of white, blurry dots. Grief and sympathy in the lines of their bodies curving into each other. And then just her, like she doesn’t have a care in the world, sunlight painting her gold.

“She makes me better,” she tells Max abruptly. It comes out sounding almost apologetic.

“You make each other better,” Max replies just as instantly. Her face is an open book, just like it always has been, but there’s more to read in it now. There’s grief, but no regret. There’s a guarded sort of interest that Rachel wants to see more of. There’s relief, held back carefully like she can’t quite believe it still. Like believing it is what will shatter it.

Rachel is drawn to honest people, but more than that she is drawn to people who make her want to be honest, too.

“And you made us,” she says quietly.

“No. I couldn’t have done it without you. We’re a _we_. We did this together. Chloe gathered the evidence, and you saved her life when I wasn’t around to do it. Partners,” she takes a deep breath as if to steel herself for something, “partners in time.”

“Hey! Partners in time! I like that!” Chloe comes sauntering up behind Max and wraps her arms around her, resting her chin on Max’s head. Max’s expression shutters briefly, then she smiles. 

“You would,” she says gently, covering Chloe’s hands with one of hers and stumbling back a little, into her. Chloe holds her tight, swaying her a little to the sides like a shuffling dance, giving Rachel a grin over the top of Max’s head.

_All the stars are still there,_ Rachel thinks. The thought that she will never see the blue-haired Chloe again gives her a weird feeling that she can’t seem to shake. She has never been good at dealing with other people’s deaths, the thought of them being just simply gone too big for her mind. This is an entire reality that never even existed. 

She doesn’t like it when things are out of her reach, and she can only imagine what it’s like for Max.

“We should go home,” Max says eventually, gently freeing herself from Chloe’s embrace. She’s still holding the lily, twirling the stem between her fingers, lost in thought.

“Sure,” Rachel says before Chloe can open her mouth. Max looks like she needs some alone-time. “I need to learn my lines still.”

They pile into Chloe’s truck, Rachel calling shotgun this time, and drive Max back to Blackwell.

Rachel is working painstakingly on removing a page from her dream journal, and ignoring Chloe’s sideways glances as best she can.

“What’s happening?” Chloe asks eventually, voice low enough to barely travel over the rumble of the engine. She sounds just a little lost.

“Good things, I’m pretty sure,” Rachel says. She smiles up at Chloe (her Chloe, she thinks, who she remembers when and why she cut her hair the way she did, who she knows what makes her laugh and that she would die for her and that she has no regrets.)


	2. Three's a Crowd

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! I haven't had the time to reply to comments, so that will happen on the weekend - thank you, everyone, they continue to make me very happy! <3
> 
> I'm also posting this from my phone, so please be kind about all the typos I overlooked!

Rachel spends the next few weeks getting to know Max again.

Sometimes, she feels like she’s there already: Max is still herself, soft-spoken, slightly awkward, unapologetically nerdy. Kinda nosy. But then she sees her talk to Kate with a voice that betrays a kindness Max used to reserve for her closest friends, or get Dana to engage in conversation that goes beyond small-talk, or talk back to Victoria without hesitation, and she has to reevaluate. 

It’s probably a side-effect of being able to rewind time: if you can erase any missteps from people’s memories - why not talk to them? If you can rewind and have a witty remark at the ready, why not step up to your enemies? It could be threatening, seeing Max rise in everyone’s esteem until she rivals Rachel in popularity. 

Instead, it’s refreshing to see her maneuver her way through conversations so deftly. 

It takes her a while to realize she’s in a lot deeper than she thought. It happens in passing, really: Victoria makes a disparaging comment towards Kate, who apparently was invited to a Vortex Club party in early October and “didn’t even drink, you know, like a nun”, and Max, who happens to be on the way past, whirls around, murder in her eyes. 

“Maybe _you_ should have channelled your inner nun instead of sexting your friend’s boyfriend and then framing another friend for it, _Victoria_.” Dana perks up at that, and suddenly her whole fight with Juliet that Rachel unsuccessfully tried to mediate a few weeks ago makes a lot more sense.

Victoria stares. There is a twist to Max’s mouth that says she will pull up the receipts if she has to. She is a head shorter than Victoria, but the tilt of her head is sideways, not upwards. Rachel moves from where she was talking to Dana to stand at Max’s side, because she may not be Kate’s friend but she’s never on Victoria’s side of an argument, ever.

“H- how- have you been in my _room?!”_

“And if I have been?” Max sounds a little defensive. “Do you really think that’s worse than stealing someone’s phone to send juicy texts?” 

She shakes her head and raises a hand.

_.dnah a sesiar dna daeh reh sekahs ehS_

_”?stxet yciuj dnes ot enohp s’enoemos gnilaets naht esrow s’taht kniht yllaer uoy oD“ .evisnefed elttil a sdnuos xaM ”?neeb evah I fi dnA“_

  
  


“Funny how you feel like I invaded your privacy, do you think Juliet feels the same way?” Max says. She sounds clipped, almost bored. Like she’s done this a million times. Maybe she has.

This is the moment that Dana steps up with a hearty “I do, actually”, and Rachel uses Victoria's distraction to pull Max to the side. 

“That was vicious, my friend. _Vicious_.” She has to fight to keep the amount of audible adoration reasonable, and judging by the knowing quality of Max’s answering grin, she doesn’t quite succeed. 

“C’mon, let’s grab the spot at the fountain before they can. We deserve it.”

“I don’t know about _deserve_ ,” Max sighs, but lets herself be gently nudged in the direction. “I’ll have to have a long conversation with Victoria about her insecurities at some point, but you know. She’s been getting on my nerves in all timelines, every run-through. Nobody else has managed that shit. But I know it’s tough for her, she trusted Nathan more than anyone else here and put a lot of hopes into Jefferson, and now they’re both gone and not even she will be able to remember them fondly.” 

Max sounds tired then, and Rachel gives her a few pats on her back. She smiles a bit, but her eyes haven’t lost any of their intensity. She still, through the tiredness and the grateful smile, looks ready to pounce on anyone who threatens or insults her friends.

That is the moment Rachel realises she’s not going to be able to backpedal on this, if it goes wrong.

Ah, well, she thinks, sitting down on the edge of the fountain, she’ll have to let Max handle the backpedaling. 

She’s not too worried.

Chloe joins them before too long, swooning back on top of the low wall surrounding the fountain and crossing her legs in the air dramatically, already halfway into a tirade about the uselessness of math and the futility of trying to teach it to her.

Max sits down with her back to the wall, leaning her head back into Chloe’s hip, and smiles. They’ve got ten minutes until math starts, and life is good. Rachel lets herself have a moment to admire the casual closeness that has been building between Chloe and Max. 

Rachel almost sees it coming when Chloe uncrosses and recrosses her feet, giving it a smidge too much momentum and toppling over into the fountain, comically wide eyes going briefly blank as her head hits stone with a sickening noise - 

_\- esion gninekcis a htiw enots stih daeh reh sa knalb ylfeirb gniog seye ediw yllacimoc ,niatnuof eht otni revo gnilppot dna mutnemom hcum oot egdims a ti gnivig ,teef reh sessorcer dna sessorcnu eolhC nehw gnimoc ti sees tsomla lehcaR_

Rachel almost sees it coming when Chloe uncrosses and recrosses her feet, giving it a smidge too much momentum - then there’s a sudden blur, and Max is up on her feet, catching Chloe before she can fall into the fountain, pulling her over and onto the concrete below. Her face is white as a sheet.

Chloe is laughing, gathering her limbs with a lack of grace that looks on purpose in a way that is uniquely _Chloe_. “Oh God, thank you, Max, as much as I’d have liked to miss math to get changed…” she trails off. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Max says.

She hasn’t looked away from Chloe at all, as though she might catch fire at any point. Rachel gets the sense that this is not about the fountain.

“Hey,” Rachel says gently. “She’s okay. She’ll be okay.”

“How would _you_ know?” Max snaps, and then pulls a face, raising a hand. Rachel puts hers on top of it. 

“Don’t rewind when you’re rude to me. I can take it.” She only releases Max’s hand when Max nods, and then says: “No offense, but I know her better than you. We’ve been through some shit together. She can be a bit reckless, but she doesn’t have a death wish.”

“She’s also standing _right next to you guys_ ,” Chloe says, sounding half amused and half annoyed, as she does. 

“Yeah, but she’s bad at finding the right words, so I’m taking over. Max, I get why you feel responsible for Chloe and maybe even a little for me. But I promise, we can take it from here. You made sure we’d be fighters. Well, here we are.”

Max nods slowly. “It’s not that I don’t _know_ that, it’s just that I’m afraid anyway.”

“No,” Chloe says, “no, that makes sense, you’ve been through _hell_ , of course that would leave scars.”

Rachel gives herself a moment to love Chloe for how earnest she sounds whenever Max brings up her alternate past.

Max cards a hand through her hair. Rachel resolves to help her through whatever she has accumulated in the past few weeks of her own reality.

“I’m such a mess,” Max sighs. “You know, it’s hard to believe that the worst thing this week has in store for us is math -” 

“- Not that math isn’t the worst,” Chloe is quick to intercept.

“If you had paid attention at any point in the last ten lessons, you wouldn’t think that,” Rachel says.

“See, only someone who’s good at math could say something like that. Math is a mystery. I fail to see any reason in it. There’s nothing natural about it. Humanity just fucked around and created it out of thin air for no good reason.”

Max is looking between the two of them, amused. She doesn’t seem to have any stakes in the discussion, happy instead to let it guide them away from the heavy topic.

“I take it back, you should have paid attention in like the _first_ ten math lessons you ever had. You’ve got some misconceptions.” Rachel takes Chloe by the wrist, tugs her close to press a kiss to the corner of her mouth. 

She watches Max out of the corner of her eyes. Max is still standing by the fountain, wide eyes fixed on them. It’s hard to believe she’s the same person who faced down Victoria ten minutes ago without even blinking. Rachel loves making her blush, racing herself to it, and there it is, the color rising in Max’s cheeks like a sweet reward.

Rachel turns it into a little show for her, and Chloe goes along willingly enough. She takes care to make it look easy, spinning Chloe, then dipping her a bit and kissing her again on her laughing mouth.

Max, when Rachel looks back to her, is smiling a bit, like she’s not quite sure this is for her but she’ll take it anyway.

Rachel angles a wink at her right as the bell sounds.

“Are you flirting with my best friend,” Chloe whispers out of the corner of her mouth from where she’s still dramatically swooning in Rachel’s arms, _“by kissing me?!”_

Rachel shrugs. “I’m nothing if not efficient.” She steadies Chloe and starts towards the main entrance, throwing a smile over her shoulder to whoever may catch it.

Rachel is good at getting what she wants. She may not always know why she wants what she wants, but questioning that has never gotten her anywhere. Besides, Chloe and Max both are great at getting in their own heads. She can let them do that part.

So she sets out to woo Max, and reassure Chloe, and maybe help Max with her demons while she’s at it. 

_Two’s company. Three’s a crowd_ , her mom likes to say. Rachel has always been good with a crowd.

*

“Sometimes,” Max tells her in a quiet moment, sandwiched between lessons and homework, “I wonder if any of it actually happened.” 

They’re up by the lighthouse, just the two of them. Chloe is having one of her tea sessions with Kate. It’s getting cold, wind whipping salt into their faces, the sea below gray and wild. Max does not get tired of stating how much she loves it, even if she sends worried glances to the horizon every so often. 

She is different when they’re alone. Half of Rachel hopes that she’s the same with Chloe, and half of her wants it all to herself, her openness, her secrets. Rachel hesitates to talk to her about the second half of her dream journal, the one that sometimes features Max, but there's a sort of quiet understanding between them regardless: Like they both know what Max means when she says she's been through hell. Like it's real to them in a way it can never be to anyone else.

“I thought I was just straight up making all of it up before you came out with all your stuff,” Rachel replies. “I’m glad we’ve got each other.”

Max nods. 

Rachel reaches into her bag to get her dream journal. It falls open in her palm, and a loose page almost flutters out. She snatches it out of the air and hands it to Max.

“If you ever doubt it again, read this,” she says.

“Thank you,” Max says, tucking the page safely into her bag. 

They sit together quietly, watching the sea, the gray sky. 

“Do you ever think we could be a thing?” Rachel asks eventually, on a whim, when they’ve been quiet too long for her taste. 

“All the time,” Max replies, like it’s easy. 

Rachel laughs. It’s that easy? She never thought it would be that easy. She leans forward and kisses Max straight on the mouth, and Max kisses her back with absolutely no restraint or hesitation, and it’s - 

_\- s’ti dna ,noitatiseh ro tniartser on yletulosba htiw kcab sessik xaM dna ,htuom eht no thgiarts xaM sessik dna drawrof snael ehS .ysae taht eb dluow ti thguoht reven ehS ?ysae taht s’tI .shgual lehcaR_

_.ysae s’ti ekil ,seilper xaM ”,emit eht llA“_

  
  


“A thing?” Max asks, like she doesn’t understand, but she’s suddenly sitting bolt upright.

“The three of us. Do you think it would work?”

Max stares at her, like she honestly never considered the possibility that Rachel might bring up the elephant in the room. 

Rachel has to remind herself that this Max and her don’t actually know each other that long yet. Max doesn’t know that bringing up the elephant in the room is sort of what Rachel does.

“I don’t know. I feel like it would be unfair to Chloe, maybe. Because I was in love with a different version of her, and it might make her feel like she’s just a substitute. Which she isn’t.”

Rachel notices blood on her upper lip, a slow trickle. She may not know this Max too long, but she knows her long enough to understand what that means.

“What did you say before that? I don’t want the update. Give me Max 1.0,” she demands.

Max holds the back of her hand to her nose and stares some more.

“Max 1.0 was overwritten, remember,” she says flatly.

“Well, give me the uncensored version of this one,” Rachel corrects herself blithely. “I promise I’m old enough to handle it. I can show you some ID if you want.”

Max laughs, a little incredulous. “I said, ‘all the time’, and you kissed me,” she says. “I felt like maybe you’d want to talk to Chloe about it before doing something like this.”

Rachel sees the point in that, she does. She still feels cheated of her first kiss with Max. 

“Mhm. Maybe I should. You hold onto that kiss until then,” she says.

On the drive back to Blackwell, Max unfolds the page Rachel gave her, probably at least 90% to not have to look at her. She is beet red. 

Rachel grins to herself as she drives.

_This is a good one, you think as soon as you appear next to Chloe this time. Or, as good as they get, here._

_She’s lying on a rooftop, puffing clouds of smoke into the summer-blue sky. She seems as happy as she gets, alone and quiet. A small wireless radio is playing_ Queen _in a quality that does not befit the band._

_Chloe is humming along, and as the chorus comes up, so do you, shaping the words into existence._

(She’s a killer queen

Gunpowder, gelatine 

Dynamite with a laser beam

Guaranteed to blow your mind -)

_Chloe sits up so fast you can almost feel her dizziness. She remembers the joint in her hand just in time before she tries to shield her wide eyes from the sun. She stops singing along, and now you hear your own voice singing, distorted in the way that radios do to people’s voices._

_“Rachel?” Chloe says, incredulous, peering over the edge of the rooftop._

Yes _, you say. It comes out warbled, staticky, but it comes out._

_Chloe zeroes in on the radio, then on her joint, and she deflates._

_“Fuck, but I miss you,” she says on a sigh._

I’m here, _you say._ I’ve been here the whole time.

(Insatiable an appetite)

_“But you’re not. You left me, like everyone else.” Chloe flops back onto her back, arms spread wide. A cross, until she sacrifices her dramatic pose to take another drag._

That’s not true, _you say._ I’m as here as I can be.

(She never kept the same address)

_Chloe curls towards the radio, like she sometimes does towards you. A question mark. A parenthesis that you wish you could complete._

I love you _, you say. You don’t have anything else to say. You don’t have to say anything else._

_“I love you too,” Chloe says, and finishes her joint, and dries her tears, and_ (You wanna try?) _turns off the radio._

_She seems calmer than before. It’s the best you can do, you figure._

Max meticulously refolds the page. “You skipped this one when you read your journal to us,” she says, keeping her gaze forward.

“It felt personal.” Rachel slows the car to a crawl as they descend the hill in a winding pattern. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted either of you to know. And then I didn’t know if it was you I wanted to know or Chloe.”

“And now?”

“And now I feel silly for hiding from either of you. We’re in this together. This is _our_ story.”

Max’s hand lands on Rachel’s arm, a warm weight. She squeezes once, lingers for a second too long, then pulls it back. 

Rachel smiles at the road. “Do you ever want to skip town?” she asks offhandedly.

She has asked Chloe the same question so many times she’s lost count, and Chloe has always, unfailingly, replied, “No, I want to help it get its shit together”. But that was before Max came back, before Chloe’s obligations were over and done with, and now there’s three of them, and they saved Arcadia Bay, and maybe three’s just barely crowd enough to survive LA together.

“Not until right now”, Max replies, dreamy. Then she frowns. “I mean, Chloe and I were about to skip town when I left the other timeline, I suppose, but that was because everyone was dead.”

She never applies any of the ridiculous sounding tenses Chloe continues to make up to her situation. Her past is her past. Chloe died, and then died again, and again, and they found Rachel dead in a junkyard, and Chloe died again, and Max was tied to a chair and was almost killed, and then when Chloe finally _didn’t_ die, everyone else did. 

Rachel’s mind likes to skip over the fact that these things are an irremovable part of Max’s life, not just fragments of a bad dream like they were for her. Like a flat stone across water, only ever briefly touching the surface of it all, and then shying away again.

_Everyone was dead._

It’s too much for a single person. 

But maybe three’s enough of a crowd to share the burden.

“Do you want to make the road trip you two would have made?” she asks, and regrets it immediately.

She’s not a part of that imaginary situation. She’s not invited, not even in the backseat, not even as the disembodied voice that occasionally filters in through the radio.

Max is staring at her, and Rachel adjusts her grip on the steering wheel, trying to keep her gaze on the road. She’s good at hiding stage fright, but she’s a stranger to regret. It’s harder to reel in.

“Yes”, Max says, something like wonder in her voice. “That is a good idea. Let’s do that.”

Rachel nods, relieved. She clears her throat. “I mean, we’d have to wait until we’re free - maybe Christmas is…”

“Fudge, Christmas is perfect!” Max yells, startling Rachel into a swerve. “We’d make the trip to Seattle and spend Christmas at my parent’s place!” More quietly, she adds, “I just have to hold out until then.”

The idea that there is a clear end to Max’s problems in the near future is almost as far-fetched as the idea that it’s going to be because of a road trip the three of them go on together, but Rachel knows of the importance of hope, and doesn’t say anything. Seattle isn’t LA, but it’s not Arcadia Bay, either, so Rachel counts that as a win. They can work their way up from there.

“You know,” Max says, her voice like spun glass. “I don’t trust the fact that things are looking up. I keep waiting for everything to get worse, and worse, and worse again.”

Rachel nods. “That makes sense.”

“I guess I always knew that stuff could go wrong. I just thought there was a rock bottom you’d hit eventually that you could work your way up from.”

She’s staring straight ahead now, and Rachel pries one of her hands off the steering wheel to touch her shoulder. It feels like stone underneath the cloth.

“There isn’t,” Max finally says, choked. “There’s no rock bottom. There’s always worse.”

Rachel thinks of the way Max ended up here, and indeed it doesn’t sound like climbing up from rock bottom. It sounds like free-falling into an abyss and then being instantly transported onto the top of a hill. It was too fast. No wonder Max can’t quite believe it.

“Let’s talk it out,” she says. “On the road trip, or right now. Get used to things going well again, without losing sight of what went wrong.”

Max nods, and gives her a brittle smile, and puts her feet up on the dashboard. “On the road trip. I’m already practicing.”

Rachel lets it slide. It’s not like it’s her car, anyway.


	3. This Particular Constellation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Out of all the chapters, this is the one I have the most mixed feelings on. I hope y'all like it <3

Rachel tries not to invite Max on Chloe and her dates more often than Chloe does, just to make sure Chloe is on the same page as her, but even with that precaution, Max is suddenly included in their free time more often than not. It’s unavoidable; Rachel’s free time, where it doesn’t involve Chloe, is very party-heavy, and Max has not changed so much that she suddenly likes dancing, drinking, and loud music. Plus, Chloe wants to spend more time with Max now, too, so really it’s only practical that they should all spend their free time together instead of in pairs.

So getting ice cream together and eating it by the coast becomes something of a routine, and they use it to flesh out a basic plan for the road trip that Max’s parents recently greenlit, until the ice cream shop closes up for the winter. 

After that, they have to get more creative. The following Saturday, Chloe and Rachel crowd into Max’s room with a few bottles of beer they managed to smuggle in, and Max looks up and just pats her bed on both sides of herself, looking half defeated and half intrigued. Rachel expected at least a token complaint, but if they’ve already worn down her defenses in an alternate timeline - all the better.

Rachel sits down, kicks off her shoes, and tucks her feet underneath her thighs. Chloe cuddles up to Max’s other side, already opening her bottle of beer and pressing a second one into Max’s hand. “So we came into some beer and we decided to come and play truth or dare with you,” she says cheerfully.

“Do I get a say in this?” Max asks, but she sounds amused, so they skip right past that and start the game.

Max gets even snarkier when drunk, to Rachel’s absolute delight, and halfway through her second bottle, she asks Chloe on a Truth, “So, what’s _your_ secret superpower?”

Rachel laughs, and Chloe downs the rest of her own beer and replies, nonchalant, “Opening bras with one hand. Through a shirt.”

“ _One hand?_ How does that even work?” Max has been beet red from the time she took her first few sips, so there is no way to tell if she’s embarrassed. She is using that to her advantage, and Rachel is very impressed.

“If you want a demonstration, catch me on a dare,” Chloe says, waggling her eyebrows at Max.

Rachel listens within herself for jealousy and comes up empty. 

“Rachel,” Chloe says. 

“Truth,” Rachel replies, the familiar flutter of stage fright beneath her ribs. 

“How do you feel about Max?”

Max looks up at her, beer halfway to her mouth. She slowly reaches out her free hand.

“Unmoored”, Rachel says quickly, before Max can rewind. “Electric. To the extent that you make me feel safe, she keeps surprising me, and I’m loving every second of it.” Max lets her hand sink, giving her a lopsided smile. _Are we doing this?,_ her smile seems to say. _If Chloe picks truth, we are,_ Rachel promises her silently. “Chloe?”

“Dare.” And of course it’s not that easy. But there’s a part of Rachel that is enjoying this dance very much, as well, so she doesn’t waste any time mourning the opportunity.

“I dare you to demonstrate how to open a bra one-handed.”

Chloe gets up and sets her beer down in one fluid motion. Rachel watches her expression, but there’s no jealousy there, only the kind of delight she usually shows when they’re breaking the law: Like this is forbidden, and all the more delicious for it.

She crooks a finger toward Rachel, and Rachel obediently turns her back towards her. “Watch and learn, Jane,” Chloe says. 

Max gets up off the bed to get a better look. Rachel strikes a pose, and they all laugh, giddy with the knowledge that this could go weird at any moment but isn’t yet.

“You have to get your thumb on the part with the loops - so, the left side,” Chloe explains, her thumb a warm pressure point on Rachel’s spine. “Press down, then you can tug the hooks free with your index finger. Tada,” and Rachel feels the familiar relief of her bra unhooking. She breathes out. Turns around.

Max and Chloe are standing shoulder to shoulder, Chloe grinning, Max smiling the slightest bit, like she can’t believe any of this is happening. Rachel reaches underneath her shirt to re-fasten her bra, and Chloe takes pity on her and helps when she struggles to reach.

“Max,” Chloe says, giving Rachel a few pats on the back as if to signal that she’s done.

“What? Oh. Dare.” Max turns away from them, like they caught her staring, and moves back towards the bed.

“Show us what you’ve learned.” Chloe turns her back towards her, arms spread out to either side, as if that makes it easier.

Max catches Rachel’s eye, that deer-in-the-headlights look she likes to give people when she wants reassurance, and Rachel nods at her.

So Max sets down her bottle and moves to stand behind Chloe. 

Rachel flops down on the bed again, watching. Max runs her fingers over Chloe’s shirt, finding the outline of her bra (or just touching her to ground herself, Rachel isn’t judging) and pressing a thumb into her back near her spine.

She fumbles a bit _tib a selbmuf_ crooks her index finger and tugs, like an expert, and Chloe’s shirt bulges where the bra falls against it. She breathes a sigh of relief as well, rolls her shoulders, and says, “Well done, Max. If you need any other tips on how to undress girls, I’m your ma’am.”

Max laughs again, and Rachel joins in, relieved. Chloe quickly re-hooks her bra.

“Rachel”, Max says, mirth still in her eyes.

“Dare”, Rachel replies, still watching Chloe.

“I dare you to break into Blackwell.”

Rachel blinks. “What would I want in Blackwell at night? I spend enough time there during daytime?”

“Oh, you know, there’s the pool…” Max trails off, fiddling with the label on her bottle. Chloe turns towards Rachel slowly, eyebrows raised. Rachel sets down her beer.

“Done,” she says. “You’re invited.”

“It’s a date,” Chloe says. 

“Chloe and I have already been, in a different timeline,” Max confesses, and Rachel immediately imagines the scene: Chloe’s blue hair fanning out around her as she floats, Max treading water in her underwear. She’s almost sad to have missed it, but then again, maybe she can get the real thing right now if she doesn’t fuck it up.

*

Getting into Blackwell is easy enough - Max flickers and disappears from their side as soon as they reach the door, only to open it from the inside a few seconds later. She holds it open for them, giving a little bow as they pass her. The permanent blush the beer left on her cheeks is gone, replaced by a small smile.

They sneak through the dark hallways, their steps and whispers echoing way too loudly for their taste. Rachel slowly feels herself sober up, and adrenaline replace the alcohol. It’s exhilarating, Rachel thinks, and looking at Chloe, she knows that she feels the same. 

The pool gleams in the sparse light of their phones, and while Max goes to find the light switch, Chloe strips down to her underwear without even hesitating.

Max, turning back around, halogen lamps flickering on around them, looks at Chloe and then, almost panicked, at Rachel. Like she did not think this through. Like it was different the last time she did this.

It only takes Rachel a split second to work out that she can avoid Max’s eyes without losing her air of confidence if she hoists her own shirt up over her head as well, and she does so immediately.

When she emerges, she can watch the pink rise in Max’s cheeks again. As Rachel starts unbuttoning her pants, Max seems to belatedly come to the same conclusion as she had, grabbing her own shirt and disappearing into it for slightly longer than strictly necessary. She has dimples on her lower back, and they are the most adorable things Rachel has ever seen.

Rachel exchanges a look with Chloe, who gives her an amused smile that carries an edge of something wolfish, and quickly steps out of her pants. Rachel is suddenly sharply aware of how attractive everyone is, and that they are looking at her in a very similar way, when they aren’t stuck in a shirt. 

It’s, quite abruptly, all a bit much to take in.

So Rachel takes the shortest route towards a moment of privacy, which is to take a run-up and cannonball it into the pool, the sharp slap of water on her skin a welcome distraction.

She holds her breath, sinking towards the bottom of the pool, and watches Chloe’s and Max’s blurry forms appear in swirls of bubbles, bobbing up to the surface. Her heartbeat sounds dull in her own ears, speeding up with every breath she’s skipping. She hasn’t been feeling any kind of anxiety over major life decisions lately, trusting Max to help her out if she truly fucks up, but here it is: Whatever happens now, Max will know. Max will know, like she knows about their first kiss, and Rachel won’t remember. She suddenly feels the absence of the memory like a sharp pain. 

Or maybe it’s the lack of oxygen.

Sputtering, she emerges and pushes her hair out of her face, and Chloe laughs and reaches over to wipe runny makeup from her cheeks. Chloe is the one who looks most like herself in the water, her hair sticking up in wet spikes, a grin splitting her face. Rachel takes a moment to be grateful for how familiar the look of happiness is on her face, and how comfortably it sits there, like she knows she deserves it.

Max is treading water a few feet away, hair plastered to her head, making her look weirdly young and thinner than she is. 

Rachel tips Chloe’s chin up for a kiss and then swims over to Max, who is watching her silently.

“Hey,” she says, still slightly out of breath. 

“Hi,” Max replies. She looks expectant, but not apprehensive. Rachel considers this for a second and decides to plow on.

“Want to be around when I ask Chloe how she feels about the three of us potentially being a thing, or rather not?”

She watches Max wrangle with her emotions, the obvious fight of being there to potentially rewind versus the feeling of intruding on a conversation that is not only not hers to participate in, but that is _about her_ in the first place. 

“I’ll hang out here,” she finally says. “Just… signal me if you need help.” She puts her elbows up onto the edge of the pool, trying to make it look comfortable, and failing. Rachel resists the urge to kiss her cheek and pinches it instead, before making her way over to Chloe again.

“What were you guys whispering about?” Chloe asks, pale eyebrows arched in that way Rachel loves so much and that means she’s contemplating whether she should be amused or annoyed. 

“Oh, you know,” Rachel says, and feels her heartbeat rise into her throat. “I was wondering if we could be a thing, the three of us, but Max wants me to talk to you about it first.”

For a moment, Chloe’s face is entirely blank, eyebrows still caught in that polite arch, and Rachel counts her heartbeats, one-two three-four five-six, and is about to raise her hand towards Max, who is still standing by the edge and trying to look like she isn’t watching, when.

“Shit, me too,” Chloe breathes, and hitches forward, her eyes still as round, but now Rachel can see her excitement in the curve of her mouth, and she instantly feels safe again. They are all in the same boat, here, and they have someone on board who can rewind time, _what can go wrong? Don’t answer that._

Rachel catches Chloe against her shoulder with a giggle, and like a dam breaking, Chloe starts laughing, too. “We have to be _so careful_ ,” she whispers, but she’s breathless as she says it, laughter still lifting the edges of her words. After a moment, she tries again, more serious. “Are you sure you want this? I didn’t want to ask, because - you - you never seemed to get along so well with Max, before, and…” 

“I never really got to know Max before, she wasn’t trying very hard to make any friends besides you. Now that she’s making an effort, I noticed that she’s lovely. I think,” Rachel takes a deep breath, “I think she makes us both better.”

“Yes,” Chloe agrees instantly. They both turn towards Max like on cue, and Max immediately lifts both hands to hide her face.

“Hey,” Rachel calls to her, voice suddenly shaking. “Wanna come over here?”

“Is that the cool people club, where the cool people hang out?” Max asks, but she’s already swimming towards them. She’s not a great swimmer, having to tilt her head back to keep above water, and Rachel adores that, too. It seems that Rachel never knew the entirety of her capacity for love, before now.

“We’re not cool people,” Chloe says at the same time that Rachel says, “yes, and you’re invited,” and they start laughing again, giddy. 

Max reaches them, red-faced and lovely down to the last freckle, and Rachel tilts her chin up and finally, finally kisses her, thumb tracing the soft skin of her cheek.

Max barely manages to keep her chin above water, her soft mouth moving clumsily on Rachel’s, and Rachel reaches with her other hand and feels the easy give of Max’s hip as she helps her stay afloat. It’s a little awkward, but the feather-light feeling of Max’s hand on her neck, fingers trailing up to bury into her hair, makes up for it tenfold.

Rachel sighs into Max’s mouth, leaning into the hand that’s tracing nonsense patterns into the back of her skull, and she’s pretty sure she needs nothing but this for the rest of her life, except there’s a nagging thought of Chloe in the back of her mind. When she turns to look, Chloe is pointing an accusatory finger.

“You’re hogging our girlfriend,” she says. “Stop hogging our girlfriend.”

Max laughs into Rachel’s cheek for a wonderful second, a delighted sound that goes well with her wide-eyed look. “So - girlfriend? It’s that easy?” 

“The start of it is,” Chloe says, like she knows what she’s talking about. Like any of them have had more than a single serious relationship in their lives. “It’s the rest that gets difficult sometimes.”

And then she’s the one who kisses Max, and it’s like watching a film with the sound cut off, focus laser sharp. Rachel sees only the two of them, Chloe tilting her head and capturing Max’s bottom lip, hears nothing but her own heartbeat in her ears, still rapid, feels nothing but that same thrill of possibility from that first day in the junkyard, the first time she seriously considered this particular constellation. 

Rachel knows the way Chloe kisses, so she’s not surprised when Max forgets to tread water and sinks below the surface for a second, before she’s rescued by a very amused Chloe. Rachel watches Chloe’s eyebrows hitch upward along with the edges of her mouth, and the way Max sputters and laughs and clings to Chloe’s shoulders, and briefly, enticingly, Chloe’s hands on her hips as she hoists Max up out of the water.

As Max and Chloe move closer towards the shallow end of the pool to get onto solid ground, she expects to feel jealousy, at least a small pang of it. But there is only the strange thrill of knowing that at least Chloe is putting on a bit of a show for her, that she’s still a part of this, and that there will be infinite opportunities to kiss Max in the future. Like, right now.

“Hey, who’s doing the hogging now,” she calls out, and Chloe lets go of Max easily to give her a quick, dirty kiss and then leaves her to Max, who has used the time to get up on the edge of the pool, watching them with something like wonder. 

She tilts her head at her, and Max pats her thighs invitingly, like someone might for a cat. Rachel braces her hands on the edge of the pool on either side of Max’s legs and hoists herself up and into a straddle. Max, bless her, gets her hands on her hips to draw her closer still, and Rachel wastes no time going back to kissing her until Max is almost a puddle in her arms. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Chloe approaching, uncharacteristically quiet and undoubtedly enjoying the show. 

Without stopping kissing Max, she crooks her fingers in Chloe’s direction, and just as Chloe takes her hand they suddenly hear the slap of heavy boots on tile, coming closer. Rachel untangles herself from Max and looks at her with some amount of alarm, and Max raises her hand and-

_-dna dnah reh sesiar xaM dna ,mrala fo tnuoma emos htiw reh ta skool dna xaM morf flesreh selgnated lehcaR .resolc gnimoc ,elit no stoob yvaeh fo pals eht raeh ylneddus yeht dnah reh sekat eolhC sa tsuj dna ,noitcerid s’eolhC ni sregnif reh skoorc ehs ,xaM gnissik gnippots tuohtiW_

_.wohs eht gniyojne yldetbuodnu dna teiuq yllacitsiretcarahcnu ,gnihcaorppa eolhC sees ehs ,eye reh fo renroc eht fo tuO .smra reh ni elddup a tsomla si xaM litnu reh gnissik ot kcab gniog emit on setsaw lehcaR dna ,llits resolc reh ward ot spih reh no sdnah reh steg ,reh sselb ,xaM .elddarts a otni dna pu flesreh stsioh dna sgel s’xaM fo edis rehtie no loop eht fo egde eht no sdnah reh secarb lehcaR .tac a rof thgim enoemos ekil ,ylgnitivni shgiht reh stap xaM dna ,reh ta daeh reh stlit ehS_

_.rednow ekil gnihtemos htiw meht gnihctaw ,loop eht fo egde eht no pu teg ot emit eht desu sah ohw ,xaM ot reh sevael neht dna ssik ytrid ,kciuq a reh evig ot ylisae xaM fo og stel eolhC dna ,tuo sllac ehs ”,won gniggoh eht gniod s’ohw ,yeH“_

Rachel is about to call in that promise when Max hastily gets up from the edge of the - from the edge of the pool? When did she get there? And makes for her pile of clothes, gesturing for both of them to follow. 

There is an urgency about her that makes it clear that they’re about to be found out, and Rachel’s heartbeat quickens again, the familiar kick she gets out of running from authorities.

They grab their clothes and run, wet footsteps smacking loudly against the tiled floor, following Max’s directions. 

When Rachel pays attention to it, Max’s form seems to flicker and skip from time to time in ways that seem impossible enough for her brain to skip over them entirely and retouch a reality in which Max just knows impossibly well where their pursuers are.

It’s weird and creepy and exciting in all the best ways, and when Max crams them all into a supply closet and tells them to get dressed, Rachel spends just enough time on a fantasy where she says the opposite for Max to smack her upside the head and tell her to hurry, which, frankly, doesn’t help.

Managing to shimmy into her jeans without a chance to towel down first is less fun, but they somehow they all manage, and Max, impossibly, incredibly, leads them out into the icy cold November night. 

They run, zig-zagging, laughing, breathless, and it takes Rachel a while to look up and stutter to a halt.

A shooting star is flitting across the clear night sky, and she thinks, desperately, hurriedly, more felt than worded, _let us keep this._

It hasn’t even glimmered out yet when a second one appears, and then a third, and Rachel grabs Chloe’s arm as she’s running past and gasps out, “ _Make a wish, quick, make - make three wishes”,_ like it’s the most important thing in the world. Like if they don’t make a wish on each of the shooting stars, none of them will come true.

Chloe stops, and stares, and that’s when it starts in earnest: Streaks of light, flashing rapidly and flickering out, dozens at a time. _Let us remember this,_ Rachel wishes, and _Go easy on us,_ and, _Let us be there for each other,_ and like an afterthought, _Let this be real._ She doesn’t realize until Chloe turns in her grasp and hugs her that she has been holding on to her way too tightly.

They only remember to turn toward Max after a minute or so, and find her standing stock still and staring at the sky in what looks like a mix of horror and awe.

As if in a trance, she reaches for her camera, fiddling with the settings for a second, and snaps a picture of the sky.

Rachel comes up to her side slowly, like she would approach a petrified deer, and rests a hand on her shoulder. Max flinches minutely, but leans into the touch almost immediately after.

“What are you thinking?” Rachel asks quietly.

“What if it’s a bad sign? Like the snow? Like the two moons?” Max asks back, wide-eyed. She still has her head tilted up, and Rachel can see the reflection of the shooting stars flicker in her eyes.

“I don’t believe in bad signs,” Chloe says from Max’s other side. “Either it’s a bad thing in its own right, or it’s nothing.”

Rachel thinks back to the junkyard, overgrown and beautiful. The lilies growing on Chloe’s car. She remembers the way Max described the dead animals she found everywhere in the alternate timeline, the snowfall, the eclipse. The storm. Her own brief memories from that timeline, matching in sinisterness. If there’s a time to believe in signs, this is it. In the back of her mind, she starts connecting dots.

“I think they’re beautiful,” she offers. “Why don’t we see them as beautiful now, and leave the worrying for if they turn out to be harbingers of the apocalypse, which,” she shrugs. “Never heard of it. Shooting stars are good things. Make a couple of wishes. Get them all out now while you can.”

Max visibly makes a wish, and relaxes a fraction.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay. Thank you. Let’s get home, I’m freezing.”

They huddle together and walk back to the dorm, tilting their heads to watch the sky one at a time. 

  
_What could go wrong?_ Rachel wonders, looking up at the spectacular night sky, with the stars looking just out of reach. _Surely nothing, now that we’re so well stocked with wishes._


	4. Not Going Anywhere

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter of this book, remember to subscribe to the series if you're interested in Chloe's point of view! I'm gonna give a content warning for bugs and dead bodies mentioned for this one. If you want to skip that part, if you get to "There is no space for privacy, here", skip to "Rachel realizes at once".

It takes Max a full 32 hours to realize that she is an equal partner in their relationship now, but when she does, she doesn’t waste any time.

She catches Rachel before first class the following Monday, assuming (correctly) that Chloe would never show up early to anything, and pushes her into the same supply closet she did two nights ago, and Rachel barely has enough time to work up hope that this time will be less hurried and more steamy before her eyes adjust to the dim light of Max’s phone and she catches her very serious expression.

“Uhm, hi,” Rachel says, trying for a neutral tone of voice, leaning against a shelf and crossing her arms. “What’s up?”

“So, there is no nice way to say this.” Max takes a breath. “If you’re cheating on Chloe and me in any way, shape or form, I will find out and I will make sure there are consequences.”

 _“What?!”_ Rachel asks. She spends a few seconds trying to figure out what this is about, and comes up empty. Unless - “Is this about me kissing you before we were officially a thing? Because you rewound that, and anyway, I am reasonably sure Chloe would’ve been on board-”

_”-draob no neeb ev’dluow eolhC erus ylbanosaer ma I ,yawyna dna ,taht dnuower uoy esuaceB ?gniht a yllaiciffo erew ew erofeb uoy gnissik em tuoba siht sI“ - sselnU .ytpme pu semoc dna ,tuoba si siht tahw tuo erugif ot gniyrt sdnoces wef a sdneps ehS .sksa lehcaR ”!?tahW“_

_”.secneuqesnoc era ereht erus ekam lliw I dna tuo dnif lliw I ,mrof ro epahs ,yaw yna ni em dna eolhC no gnitaehc er’uoy fI“ .htaerb a sekat xaM_

Max flickers for a moment, and then wipes at her mouth in a now-familiar gesture, so Rachel supposes she figured there _were_ nicer ways to say this after all. “In the reality I come from, you cheated on Chloe with your pot dealer.”

Rachel’s mind immediately skips to Frank, and she recoils hard enough into the shelf to make her head spin.

“ _Frank?”_ she says, dumbstruck.

“Yeah. I realize that in this timeline, you probably didn’t do anything wrong, so I won’t be paranoid about it, but just know that if anything like this ever comes up, I _will_ tell Chloe, and I _will_ leave you, and I _will_ make sure that she does as well.”

Rachel feels the back of her head for a bump. 

“I know Chloe can’t find out whether you’re lying, but I can,” Max continues.

“Yeah,” Rachel says. “That sounds fair.”

She doesn’t like the knowledge that there is a timeline in which she is a cheater, even less so than she likes the knowledge that that’s the timeline in which she ends up drugged and dead and buried in a junkyard. 

She doesn’t know what to do with this information. That she has that capability. That she has it in her, somehow, to become that kind of person, to betray her partner like that. With someone like _Frank_ , for whatever fucked up reason _._

Max, opposite her, shakes her head and starts raising her hand, and Rachel very much does not want to relive this moment in any way, even if it will be the first time again. More importantly, she can’t imagine a timeline where she reacts better than this. She stops Max’s hand with hers.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’ll get there. Give it time.”

Max laughs like someone who can turn back time. Like someone for whom the worst thing she can imagine is to let it play out, an endless line stretching in front of her, and it probably is.

Rachel pulls her in, very carefully, until she can place the lightest of kisses on her lips.

“Thank you for telling me,” she says. “But that’s not me. I’m alive, and I’m not cheating. But I will take care not to turn into,” she pauses, “your Rachel.”

“No, I didn’t know that Rachel. _You’re_ my Rachel,” Max says immediately, like Rachel knew she would, like she was hoping she would, and kisses her back with a little more urgency. Rachel sighs and snakes her arms around Max’s waist.

Just as she feels the tension bleed out of Max’s shoulders and she shuffles closer, the bell rings, somehow even louder in the tiny confined space of the closet. Groaning, they disentangle themselves.

Max pushes open the door, only to walk directly into a grinning Chloe’s arms.

“Were you two getting it on in a broom closet without me?” she asks, and Max blushes so hard Rachel worries for a second that she’ll pop a blood vessel.

“I wouldn’t have taken you for the sort. At least wait for me,” Chloe adds, and there’s a spike of jealousy in her good-natured tone that Rachel takes care to note. Maybe she has a reason for it. In a different reality, she definitely does.

“Don’t worry, Max only gave me a very stern talk about what it means to be in a relationship with her,” she says, trying to sound reassuring and falling into something like sarcasm instead.

Chloe visibly doesn’t believe her until Max nods at her.

“Oh?” She says then, like she doesn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed, “How come I haven’t gotten that talk yet?”

“You’ll get one, don’t worry,” Max says lightly, and steps out of the closet and out from between them. 

Rachel leans in to kiss Chloe good morning. For the first time, she wonders if her talent to lie flawlessly is actually a burden. If not for her, then for the people around her.

“I’m not lying,” she says quietly. It’s something she has chosen to be honest about. She may lie, she sometimes finds it impossible not to, but when she says she is being honest, she is.

Chloe accepts it immediately. She nods, gives her hand a squeeze, and says: “Thank you.”

*

Adding a third member to the relationship poses some external difficulties that they tackle one by one:

Firstly, spending the nights together is something of a problem - not the first time around, when they just have a ‘sleepover’ at Chloe’s place, the air mattress on the floor empty as they all crowd onto Chloe’s queen sized bed.

Not the second time around either, when they repeat the ‘sleepover’ charade at Rachel’s place - her bed is smaller, but they manage.

Not even the third time, when Rachel and Chloe tell their parents they’re staying with a friend at Blackwell and they all pile up in Max’s single.

But after that, things get tricky. 

Chloe has adopted a _don’t ask, don’t tell_ strategy, in which she doesn’t tell Joyce what’s going on _exactly,_ but doesn’t hide how much time she’s - _they are_ \- spending with Max. 

“If she wants to know, she’ll ask,” she says, shrugging. “If she doesn’t, she’ll just keep saying how _glad_ she is that we’re both getting along with Max _so well,_ and how much of a _good influence_ she is.” She gives a sardonic smile that turns into a gasp when Max responds by pointedly sucking a bruise into the soft skin just above her clavicle.

Max is not telling anyone anything, but she overhears people talking sometimes - Victoria especially seems to have made it her personal goal to out them to the entire school - and sometimes Rachel catches Kate looking when Max is being particularly cute with Chloe. Rachel can’t help but feel it’s a brittle peace.

Rachel -- and she is not proud of this -- is lying through her teeth to her parents. This is the problem with being good at lying: you just sort of start resorting to it whenever it’s convenient. She tells them she is staying at Chloe’s, at Dana’s, she lets Max in through the back door when Chloe is supposedly the only person staying over.

Nobody notices, because Max can turn back time and because Rachel is just that good of a liar.

Another problem that surfaces is that beds… are not made to be occupied by three people.

They all lose a lot of sleep over it, quite literally.

Even though they’re all thin, and Max has a tendency to cling to whoever is available at night (It’s Rachel. It’s always going to be Rachel. Chloe likes to kick everyone out of touching range when she gets ready to sleep), a queen size is not big enough for three, let alone a single.

There’s always someone teetering over the edge or squished to a wall, and the one lying in the middle (Max) complains about overheating. 

None of this is helped by the fact that Max gets restless in the night - the first time Rachel realizes this is during that first ‘sleepover’ at Chloe’s place - because she has night terrors. 

There is no nicer name for them. 

Rachel is a heavy sleeper, so by the time she’s woken up by Chloe and Max’s quiet voices, Chloe is already halfway through talking her down from what looks like quite the panic attack. Max is shivering; Rachel can feel it, still pressed against her. There is no space for privacy, here. 

“They buried her, Chloe,” she’s saying, and Rachel realizes with a lurch that they are talking about her. “They _buried_ her, and by the time we found her, she was -”

She makes a gagging noise, and Chloe squeezes her arm. “She’s right here, Max,” she says.

“Not going anywhere,” Rachel confirms, voice still rough with sleep. “Here, come here.” 

Max hitches a breath and turns to face Rachel.

“ _I saw you,”_ Max says urgently, eyes wide, “Rachel, I saw your _face_ , it was the first time I saw you in real life, and your skin was _crawling_

_with_

_bugs, and for a split second, you wonder if this is the feeling people call ‘someone walked over your grave’, except worse. Someone discovered your grave and dug up your decaying body._

_It’s visceral and horrifying and it means absolutely nothing the second Chloe says “Rachel?” and you can feel her grief, her despair in the air around you. “No - no, Rachel, please not her --”_

_No, you try to say, I’m here, I’m_ fine, _come find me - but there’s nothing, not even the wind turning into a whisper for you as Chloe turns away to retch, and then cry._

 _Beside you, Max moves to comfort her and_ you can’t, and that’s not right.

_“What kind of world does this?” Chloe asks, and - if you could just - make them come to your world, it would be fine - a sign, they need a sign -_

_So you go up, further, into the blue sky, faster and faster until the world is tiny beneath you and you’re surrounded by darkness, and you try to make a sign, whatever that means._

Rachel realizes at once that she both has no idea how to deal with this and also _has to figure it out right now_ , for Max - because nobody else can help her with this.

So she pushes aside the memory of what she thought at the time was a nightmare of her own, pulling Max closer. 

“And then you saved me,” she says. “Aren’t you glad it was this way around? I’m fine and I’m alive and I am _so gone for you,_ look at me, come on.” 

Max isn’t looking at her, she has rolled up into a ball and tucked her face into Rachel’s chest, and it takes a few seconds for Rachel to realize she’s listening to her heartbeat. 

She looks over at Chloe, or at the Chloe-shaped shadow on Max’s other side. Chloe shakes her head. 

Between them, Max is slowly calming down. Slowly.

It takes Rachel a while to go back to sleep after that, between feeling the phantom crawl of bugs on her face and remembering the look on Max’s face when she told her how they found her, urgent and desperate.

They take turns comforting Max, after that.

Max seems to grow used to the timbre of their soothing voices quickly, and she calms down faster. Squished between them, she falls asleep again, leaving them awake with the aftertaste of whatever awful detail she remembered that night.

*

It gets to a point where Chloe jokes that people should be able to tell that they’re together by the dark circles under their eyes, and she’s not wrong.

They start splitting up for the night, taking turns - Rachel and Max cozying up on the single in Max’s room while Chloe curls up on her bean bag chair, Chloe and Max in Chloe’s bed while Rachel holds Max’s hand from the air mattress on the floor, Chloe and Rachel - no - Max climbing into bed with them in the middle of the night, shaking and apologetic.

Rachel remembers moments like this from previous flings, when the lovestruck first few weeks gave way to reveal problems that couldn’t be solved by simply pouring more affection on top. The discomfort always made her want to leave, an urge to stop this mess of feelings and weirdness and never look back on it.

This time, Rachel finds that there is no part of her that wants to leave, not even the icy sole of her foot that she keeps braced against the floor so she won’t fall out of the bed. Even cranky and so tired she aches, with Max’s hair constantly getting into her mouth, she has faith: They’ll figure it out. They have all the time in the world, and after this semester is over, maybe they can save up for their own apartment, where nobody can question the size of their bed.

The following days, whenever she can’t sleep, Rachel finds herself fantasising about their potential future apartment.

Eventually, the nightmares get less frequent, then seem to stop entirely. Rachel allows herself a tiny amount of pride.

*

Rachel doesn’t really mean to keep lying to everyone about their relationship for the rest of her life. It’s just that lying comes easily to her, and it doesn’t cost her any effort, so she doesn’t question it.

Sometimes, she looks at Max deftly wind her way through an elaborate construct of lies, tissue already in hand, and she remembers that not everyone is getting through this on instinct.

She waits for the inevitable with a little bit of unease.

*  
  


“Maybe we should tell Kate,” Max says at some point, the three of them crammed into Max’s room, ostensibly to do homework, but in a state of undress that’s unfit for a study group of any kind. They’re acutely aware that as soon as anyone knocks at the door, they’re as good as found out, but it’s not enough of a threat to put on more clothes.

Rachel looks to Chloe, who is lying upside down on the beanbag chair, bare legs crossed against Max’s desk. She’s wearing the same half-amused, half-surprised expression Rachel probably is. “How did you get _Kate_ when thinking of people to possibly tell?”

“Because!” Max looks frustrated for a moment. “She’s a fundamentally good person, okay? I trust her to work it out with God, like she did when you two got together.”

She has a point. When Rachel tries to find someone else who she trusts enough to tell, she comes up empty. Worse, it makes her think of Nathan, and for all she’s good with empathy how bad her radar for creepy fucks is. Maybe she shouldn’t be at the forefront of this particular mission. “Okay, sure. You tell her. If it freaks her out too badly, you can always go back, right?” 

Chloe sits up slowly, her back emitting a series of alarming cracks. Rachel admires the curve of her spine for a second as she stretches. “I think I’d like to come with.”

Max spins around to her, surprised. 

Max gets surprised by a lot of things, still. Most of them involve Rachel, but Chloe’s continued closeness with Kate is on the list, as well.

Rachel loves it most of the time.

Chloe doesn’t look like she’s loving it, right now. 

(Rachel waits for her flight instinct to kick in, as it does when the people she loves start arguing, but it doesn’t. There’s discomfort, but overpowering it is the desire to figure it out together, and the trust that they will.)

“No offense, Max, but you’ve been friends with her for longer than she’s been friends with you, and I know she trusts me. Plus, I think at least _someone_ who is not the new member of this relationship should be present, so she doesn’t think any of us are just cheating.”

Max’s face does something complicated, like she doesn’t know what to do about Chloe being harsh with her or maybe like she’s already planning to fix it.

“Well, by that logic, I should be there, too,” Rachel drops in lazily. Max drops the hand she’s been raising. “So she doesn’t think the two of _you_ are cheating on _me_.”

“ _How_ painful exactly do you want that conversation to be for Kate?” Chloe hisses, and Rachel laughs.

“Not at all, that’s why we’re taking Max!” 

Chloe shakes her head at her, but Rachel can tell there’s a smile waiting in line behind that beautiful face of hers, and Max is already laughing. 

It’s the easiest thing in the world, defusing their arguments before they happen. Rachel resolves to do it as often as they need her to.

“Good, then,” Max says. “Who wants to help me with math?” 

Chloe groans and makes a show of hiding underneath the beanbag chair, wearing it as a sort of puffy turtle shell, and Rachel turns towards her. “What do you need explained?”

“Just - exercise nine has it out for me, apparently.”

Rachel settles into Max’s lap, laughing, and is just about to begin explaining when the door slams open. They all spin around to see Warren, red-faced, raising his hands like they’re about to shoot him.

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry—”

_”—yrros os m’I ,doG ,hO“_

_.mih toohs ot tuoba er’yeht ekil sdnah sih gnisiar ,decaf-der ,nerraW ees ot dnuora nips lla yehT .nepo smals rood eht nehw gninialpxe nigeb ot tuoba tsuj si dna ,gnihgual ,pal s’xaM otni selttes lehcaR_

_”.yltnerappa ,em rof tuo ti sah enin esicrexe - tsuJ“_

_”?denialpxe deen uoy od tahW“ .reh sdrawot snrut lehcaR dna ,riahc gabnaeb eht htaenrednu gnidih fo wohs a sekam dna snaorg eolhC_

_”?htam htiw em pleh ot stnaw ohW“ .syas xaM ”,neht ,dooG“_

“That settles it, then,” Max says, bringing a hand up to her nose. “It’s all of us or no one. And now let’s put on some clothes, Warren is about to burst in.”

  
Not for the first time, Rachel thinks, _I could get used to this._

**Author's Note:**

> I will (hopefully) upload a new chapter every Thursday! Please consider leaving a comment, it would in all probability make my entire day <3 I also have a tumblr if you want to come yell at me about this (or anything else, really, I'm not picky) :)


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